Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

For Locke, indeed, there was a serious problem of how to describe all one’s memories asbeing continuously in one’s mind when yet they were not continuously “present toconsciousness.” The influence of this view has been so great that when Freud initiallyhypothesized the existence of unconscious mental processes, his proposal met widelywith stark denial and incomprehension. It was not just an outrage to common sense, itwas even self-contradictory to assert that there could be unconscious beliefs and desires,unconscious feelings of hatred, unconscious schemes of self-defense and retaliation. ButFreud won converts. This “conceptual impossibility” became respectably thinkable bytheorists once they saw that it permitted them to explain otherwise inexplicable patternsof psychopathology.The new way of thinking was supported by a crutch, one could cling to at least apale version of the Lockean creed by imagining that these “unconscious” thoughts,desires, and schemes belonged to other selves within the psyche. Just as I can keep myschemes secret from you, my id can keep secrets from my ego. By splitting the subjectinto many subjects, one could preserve the axiom that every mental state must besomeone’s conscious mental state and explain the inaccessibility of some of these statesto their putative owners by postulating other interior owners for them. This move wasusefully obscured in the mists of jargon so that the weird question of whether it was likeanything to be a superego, for instance, could be kept at bay.Freud’s expansion of the bounds of the thinkable revolutionized clinicalpsychology. It also paved the way for the more recent development of “cognitive”experimental psychology. We have come to accept without the slightest twinge ofincomprehension a host of claims to the effect that sophisticated hypothesis testing,memory searching, inference – in short, information processing – occurs within us thoughit is entirely inaccessible to introspection . It is not repressed unconscious activity of thesort Freud uncovered, activity driven out of the sight of consciousness, but just mentalactivity that is somehow beneath or beyond the ken of consciousness altogether. Freudclaimed that his theories and clinical observations gave him the authority to overrule thesincere denials of his patients about what was going on in their minds. Similarly thecognitive psychologist marshals experimental evidence, models, and theories to show thatpeople are engaged in surprisingly sophisticated reasoning processes of which they cangive no introspective account at all. Not only are minds accessible to outsiders, somemental activities are more accessible to outsiders than to the very “owners” of thoseminds.In the new theorizing, however, the crutch has been thrown away.